Mahmut Celayir
Mahmut Celayir (born May 1, 1951 in Bingöl , Turkey) is a Kurdish-German painter.
Life
origin
Mahmut Celayir was born on May 1, 1951 as the son of the bricklayer Serif Celayir and his wife Kumey Sedxunun in the small mountain village of Kur as the first of six children. Kur is located in the Turkish province of Bingöl approx. 20 km west of the provincial capital Bingöl. Celayir is a Kurd and belongs to the Iranian Zaza population .
education
After attending primary and secondary school from 1960 to 1968, he attended grammar school in Tunceli until 1971 , where he graduated from high school. In 1972, at the age of twenty, he began studying printmaking at the Istanbul University of Applied Arts under the tutors Mustafa Aslier , B. Naci Islimyeli , Ergin Inan and Mustafa Plevneli . From 1976 he completed a two-year internship at the TV Institute of Anadolu University in Eskisehir , where he devoted himself particularly to graphics and stage design. Celayir did his military service for the next two years and returned to Istanbul in 1980.
Set designer in Istanbul
In 1982 he took up a position as a set designer at the Istanbul State Theater . There he also worked on the design of the set for the play “Gods and People. Gilgamesh ”, a work by the Turkish playwright Orhan Asena. The Gilgamesh epic inspired him to study the art of the Hittites and ancient Mesopotamia , which he could study in local museums and partly on site.
Painter in Berlin
In 1984 Celayir gave up his permanent position at the theater in order to work as a freelance artist in the future. As in previous years, he again took part in competitions from 1984 to 1986, in which some of his works were awarded and purchased (see awards ). In 1986 he came to Germany for the first time. In Berlin he dealt with landscape painting, which he had chosen to be the focus of his work. He was particularly drawn to the German masters of Romanticism (including Caspar David Friedrich , Carl Blechen and Adolph von Menzel ), whom he was able to study in the museum in Berlin. He felt a kinship with Caspar David Friedrich, because “my tradition is romanticism, its melancholy, the search for the inner landscape. [Caspar David] Friedrich… looked for and painted this inner landscape ”. In Berlin he came into contact with the Galerie Oberlicht , where his first German solo exhibition also took place in 1987.
Painter in Stuttgart
In 1988 Celayir moved to Germany and settled in Stuttgart. He maintained contact with his homeland through many trips there and through repeated exhibitions in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. A stay in Eastern Anatolia in 1991 changed his view of the landscape. Instead of the light-flooded expanse of lonely landscapes, the area-filling vegetation of the clod of earth in the endless return of dry plants lost in perspective, became his theme. Over the years, the concrete, realistic view of the clod has changed to a more abstract view, which often still reveals its origin. At the same time, photo-realistic landscapes and landscape photographs are still being created today.
After the first exhibitions in Turkey, individual and group exhibitions followed almost annually from the 1990s in Germany and Turkey, both in art galleries and in renowned museums. The museum in the Kleihues building in Kornwestheim hosted the largest retrospective to date in 2008 , which gave an overview of 24 years of his work.
return
After 22 years in Stuttgart, the then 59-year-old returned to Turkey in 2010. He now lives and works in Istanbul.
plant
After fantastic-realistic beginnings, Celayir created mythically inspired works for a few years before he turned to his future main field of activity, landscape painting , in search of "the lost paradise" of his homeland. In the first years he modeled the lonely, wide mountain landscape of his homeland in a pointillist manner. At the beginning of the 1990s, however, he turned away from the large-scale perspective and dissected the soil of his homeland in his surface-filling pictures, putting it together into a tableau of drought and barreness. Only a little later he begins to dissolve the clod structure and make it independent. The previously realistic floor surface is abstractly alienated. After the turn of the millennium, he also created photo-realistic landscapes and landscape photographs .
Beginnings
Nothing is known about Celayir's works from before 1972. In the seventies he portrayed a. a. Residents of his village and created fantastic, realistic etchings.
- The small-format etching Lastensattel (illustration) shows the struggle between nature and human civilization. A giant tree, which with its bombastic dimensions is reminiscent of the world tree , is torn in half by a gigantic mountain of houses as if by lightning. Who will survive the fight?
myth
During his work at the Istanbul State Theater (1982–1984) Celayir mainly dealt with topics from Mesopotamian history. He used set pieces from architecture and the relief art of Mesopotamia and created his own, surreal-looking compositions in mixed media and oil.
- Celayir takes up an old Assyrian motif in the approximately A3-sized memorial stone picture (illustration). His protective plaque , enlarged to a monumental size , is held by a nomad, instead of a divine guardian spirit, of whom, as is usual with these protective plaques, one only sees his head and hands. The panel itself is designed in the manner of an Ishtar gate and bears a three-story relief with figures from Assyrian mythology. In the background a wide, desolate mountain region opens up with an ominous sky.
The wide landscape
From 1984 to 1991 Celayir modeled the vast, lonely mountain landscape of his homeland in mostly large-format pictures. The loneliness of the endless expanse is only seldom broken up (or underlined) by isolated nomads, animals or tents, often only by a single, almost invisible, tiny human figure lost in the landscape.
But signs of a hostile civilization also appear, e.g. B. isolated delineator posts and measuring rods or the contrails of a passing aircraft, which evoke a feeling of threat in their strangeness. The pictures are reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico and his oppressive metaphysical scenarios in lonely places or of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte , who used mountain landscapes as a threatening background and combined veiled or covered faces, crescent moon and mirror in scenes that appear absurd.
- In the picture Der Spiegel (picture) an airplane pulls past against a mountain backdrop high in the sky. A man hides his face behind a mirror, and instead of looking at himself in it, he catches the image of the crescent moon with him.
- In The Great Solitude of Alamanci Woman I (illustration), a woman and her daughter are out and about in the vast expanse of the plateau to seek refuge in a nearby refuge. The Alamanci eke out their lives alone here, while her husband goes about his business in Germany.
In terms of the painting technique, the pictures of this time are reminiscent of the pointillist technique of Seurat or the virgulist technique of impressionists like van Gogh . Small or larger dots or lines of color combine to form a local tone, and an infinite number of dots or lines combine to form an image.
The withered landscape
In some of the vast landscapes, the seed already seems to have been laid for Celayir's surface-filling images of the native plaice, which he made his subject in 1991. While until then the painter's gaze wandered into the vastness of the landscape and the sky, he now turned it down to the earth, to the barren, endlessly wide clod of his home. If the vast landscapes were composed of an infinite number of dots and lines, he now combined pieces of clod in endless, varied recurrences to form a perspective tapestry, the elements of which continue to shrink until they almost dissolve, sometimes even turning into a shimmering strip of blue To evaporate heaven.
A parallel to MC Escher cannot be overlooked. While he filled his regular surface fillings ( metamorphoses ) with graphic elements, Celayir took nature as a model. Frequently recurring motifs are small islands of clods with thick spheres of leaves and stalks that shoot up like asparagus, between which the bare dark earth, creeping plants or stones appear again and again. Sometimes the coloring adapts to the play of light and changes with increasing distance, from flaming red or bright yellow to blurred pastel tones.
Many of the often wall-filling pictures are in several parts, mostly laid out as diptychs or triptychs , a stylistic device that he continues to use later. “Thematically and creatively related to one another”, the individual images can hardly be distinguished from one another, which gives the images “a form of enhancement, of increasing content”.
The abstract landscape
Image 1: Welat - Heimat, 1992
Figure 2a: Landscape, 1994
Fig. 2b: Calligraphy, 1996
Figure 3a: Pekerun - Heimat, 2001
Figure 3b: Summer landscape, 2001
Photo 4: The Fatherland, 1994
From 1992 onwards, he created pictures in which Celayir gradually dissolves the clods of earth in the withered landscapes into abstract forms. He goes three different ways:
- The clods of earth connect and run through the landscape in long, almost monochrome strips and arcs (Fig. 1).
- The clods separate from each other and float in tatters (Fig. 2a) or as calligraphic forms (Fig. 2b) over mostly monochrome backgrounds.
- As if in a close-up, asparagus-like stalks sprout up between withered leaves in the foreground (Fig.3a) - reminiscent of the withered landscapes , or colorful balls of densely set lines and arcs interweave to form an abstract clod structure (Fig.3b). In the distance, the landscape narrows in perspective and dissolves into ever smaller lines and arcs that are reminiscent of aerial photographs of gigantic metropolises.
The artist sometimes collages his pictures with tears from newspapers (Fig. 1), or he combines them with measuring rods and layered stone pyramids ( cairns ) to create installations (Fig. 4).
The photo-realistic landscapes
Image 1: The King's Road - Kral Yolu, 2005
Image 2: In the trail of the shadows I, 2006
Photo 3: A walk in late summer I, 2007
In parallel to his abstract works, Celayir creates photo-realistic landscapes close up. These mostly large-format landscapes are based on color photographs, which Celayir alienates and exaggerates in the paintings.
- Monochrome images . While Celayir presents the viewer with a distant mountain panorama in his vast landscapes , the photorealistic works are characterized by the immediacy of close-up vision. The viewer looks almost from a frog's perspective into the stony, arid black and white landscape, as if he were standing in the middle of it. The distant mountains, on the other hand, crouch almost like a note on the horizon (Fig. 1).
- Colored pictures . As in the withered landscapes , in his color pictures he concentrates on an, albeit very small, section of the ground in close-up. The focus is not on the structure of the clods, however, but on the blooming nature and the play of glistening light and deep black shadows (Fig. 2). In other pictures he shows floor sections as in a macro shot and in plan view (picture 3).
Landscape photography
The photos of the home landscape that Celayir took on his annual vacations originally served him as notes for his painting work in Stuttgart.
Soon, however, he staged these photos similar to his pictures. Against the backdrop of the Eastern Anatolian mountain landscape, he carefully selects the motifs, sections, perspectives and the incidence of light during the day so that, like his painted works, they clearly reflect the artist's “brushstroke”.
In self-portraits with landscapes, he emphasizes the vastness and loneliness of the mountains (a silent tribute to Caspar David Friedrich, whom he admired ). A metaphor of eternity, he stands there like an archaic statue, facing the viewer and motionless, sometimes with cairns as symbolic accessories.
Printmaking
In his prints, Celayir varies his basic theme, the landscape, with various techniques, e.g. B.
- the motif of the Silk Road in black and white monotypes on brown wrapping paper (illustration),
- the motif of the King's Street in colored silkscreen monotypes
- and photorealistic landscapes screen-printed on oil-painted canvas.
Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions
- 1977: Taksim Gallery, Istanbul
- 1978: Akdeniz Gallery, Ankara
- 1985: Gallery Vakko, Istanbul
- 1987: Galerie Oberlicht, Berlin
- 1992: Arkeon Gallery, Istanbul
- 1992: Halkbank Gallery, Ankara
- 1994: Landscapes , Zapata Gallery, Stuttgart
- 1996: Leipzig Art and Auction House, Leipzig
- 1997: Silk Road - Ipekyolu , Galerie Ziraat, Ankara
- 1998: Uli Lang Gallery, Biberach / Riß
- 1999: Seidenstrasse , Sindelfingen City Gallery in Maichingen Old Town Hall, Sindelfingen
- 1999: Selçuk Yasar Museum, Izmir
- 2002: Galerie Siyah / Beyaz, Ankara
- 2002: Pictures of the Earth , Gallery of the City of Waiblingen "Kameralamt", Waiblingen
- 2002: The King's Path , Turbinenhaus Gallery, Wendlingen am Neckar
- 2004: Ataturk Cultural Center, Istanbul
- 2004: Pictures of the Earth , Gallery in the Oberlichtsaal, Sindelfingen
- 2005: Pekerun - home. The secret behind the stones , gallery fluctuating images, Stuttgart
- 2005: Yollar ve kökler (Streets and Roots), Art Center, Diyarbakir
- 2005: Kral yolu (The King's Way), Almelek Gallery, Istanbul
- 2006: Trail behind the stones , Südwestbank gallery, Stuttgart
- 2006: In the trail of the shadows , Galerie Tanner, Stuttgart
- 2007: The King's Road , Angelika Kallenbach Gallery, Bonn
- 2007: Pèkerun - place behind the rocks , gallery in the Torhaus, Leutkirch im Allgäu
- 2008: Landscape - Myth and Metaphor , Museum in the Kleihues Building, Kornwestheim
- 2009: Pekerun - Footsteps behind the stones , Gallery CAM, Istanbul
- 2010: A Wanderer's Afternoon , CAM Gallery, Istanbul
- 2011: Il pomeriggio di un viaggiatore , Spazio Studio, Milan
- 2011: Pastoral Diyaloglar (Pastoral Dialogues), Gallery CAM, Istanbul
- 2013: Mahmut Celayir - On the road of the king , Galerie Judith Andreae, Bonn
- 2014: Roots and Roads, landscape between myth and metaphor , Kunstverein Rosenheim
- 2015: Pekerun II , Gallery CAM, Istanbul
Group exhibitions
- 1977: I. Istanbul Art Biennale , Academy of Fine Arts, Istanbul
- 1979: II. Istanbul Art Biennial , Academy of Fine Arts, Istanbul
- 1982: Exhibition of the Association of Visual Artists , Istanbul
- 1983: 17th DYO Competitive Painting Exhibition , Izmir
- 1992: Annual exhibition, Württembergischer Kunstverein , Stuttgart
- 1993: On site - artists from Stuttgart , gallery under the tower, Stuttgart
- 1999: Context Landscape , Ugge Bärtle Museum House, Tübingen
- 2002: Ulmer Art Foundation pro arte, Galerie im Kornhauskeller, Ulm
- 2004: Annual exhibition "Best off" , Württembergischer Kunstverein , Stuttgart
- 2004: Middle East - Five artists from Asia , Galerie Schloß Mochental , Ehingen-Mochental
- 2004: roads and roots , art in Heppächer, Esslingen
- 2004: Project "Passage" , Galerie Dürer Goethe-Institut, Istanbul
- 2005: Landscapes , Municipal Gallery in the Kornhaus, Kirchheim unter Teck
- 2005: Art Karlsruhe , Karlsruhe
- 2005: Together , Museum in the Kleihues Building, Kornwestheim
- 2006: Right of way , international art project, Stuttgart
- 2007: Un certain regard , Galerie La capitale, Paris
- 2008: Ego kirilmalari , CAM Gallery, Istanbul
- 2011: Reminder , Gallery CAM, Istanbul
- 2013: Mahmut Celayir & Ruth Biller: The Wide View , Ratskeller, Gallery for Contemporary Art, Berlin
Awards
In the early years of his career, Celayir took part in competitions that earned him awards and acquisitions.
- 1974: Print competition at the Intercontinental Hotel, Istanbul
- 1978: Competition of the Association of Fine Artists of Turkey, Istanbul
- 1983: Painting competition of the Dyo paint company, Izmir
- 1984: Competition for science and art of the construction company ENKA, Istanbul
- 1985: Painting competition of the Talens paint company, Istanbul
- 1986: Competition for painting and printing of the paint company VIKING, Istanbul
Works in public collections
- Durmuş Yaşar Museum, Izmir
- Gallery of the city of Waiblingen "Kameralamt", Waiblingen
- Istanbul Modern , Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul
- Museum in the Kleihues building, Kornwestheim
- Regional Council Tübingen
- State Museum of Painting and Sculpture , Ankara
- State Gallery Stuttgart
literature
- Local artist: Mahmut Celayir . In: art info 1.2004, September / October, pp. 18–21. ( PDF )
- Mahmut Celayir: In the trail of shadows . In: art info 3.2006, March / April, page 24. ( PDF )
- The wanderer between the worlds. Mahmut Celayir in the city. Kornwestheim Gallery . In: art info 5.2008, March / April, page 21. ( PDF )
- Mustafa Aslier; Adnan Çoker (graphs): The history of Turkish painting , Geneva 1989.
- Günter Baumann (text); Mahmut Celayir (illustration): Trail behind the stones [exhibition in the Südwestbank gallery, Stuttgart, May 3 - June 7, 2006] , Stuttgart 2006.
- Mahmut Celayir: L'après midi d'un faune [exhibition in Spazio Studio, Milan, February 17 - March 11, 2011] , in Italian, Milan 2011.
- (ch): On the King's Road. The landscape painting by Mahmut Celayir . In: nah & fern 39.2008, pp. 8–13.
- 17th DYO Competitive Painting Exhibition [Exhibition in Izmir, 1983] , Izmir 1983, pp. 2-3.
- Angelika Flaig (editor): On site: Artists from Stuttgart [Exhibition of the Stuttgart region in the Association of Visual Artists Württemberg in the Unterm Turm Gallery, Stuttgart, August 5 to September 12, 1993] , Stuttgart 1993, pp. 6-7, 38 .
- Barbara Lipps-Kant (text); Mahmut Celayir (Illustration): New Pictures - Yeni Resimler 1991–1992 [Exhibition in the Halkbank Gallery, Ankara, 1992] , German-Turkish, Ankara 1992.
- Barbara Lipps-Kant (text); Mahmut Celayir (illustration): Seidenstrasse - Ipekyolu [exhibition in the Ziraat gallery, Ankara, May 21 - June 7, 1997] , German-Turkish, Ankara 1997.
- Barbara Lipps-Kant: Mahmut Celayir - Mitos Mazara - Mythos Landscape , German-Turkish, Kadiköy-Istanbul 1999, ISBN 975-8126-19-9 .
- Stuttgart'ın sonbaharını severim [I love autumn in Stuttgart] . In: Hürriyet Seyahat , November 15, 2010. hurarsiv.hurriyet.com.tr .
- Kaya Özsezgin (text): 12 Turkish artists from Baden-Württemberg [exhibition by the Turkish Consulate in Stuttgart, 1991] , Stuttgart 1991, pp. 18–19, 39.
- Sanart: Galleries' Choice, Compiled Exhibitions Catalog, Various Art Galleries, Ankara, October - November 1992 , English-Turkish, Ankara 1992, pp. 26-27.
- Irmgard Sedler (text); Mahmut Celayir (illustration): Landscape - Myth and Metaphor [exhibition in the museum in the Kleihues building, Kornwestheim, February - April 2008] , Kornwestheim 2008, ISBN 978-3-938507-21-6 .
- Christa-Ursula Spuler: The Turkish Drama of the Present: A literary historical study , Leiden 1968, pp. 78–90.
- Christa Frieda Vogel : Artistanbul. Contemporary artists from Istanbul present their favorite haunts , in English, Lüdenscheid 2011, ISBN 978-3-934687-95-0 , pp. 38–41, 151.
Web links
- Literature by and about Mahmut Celayir in the catalog of the German National Library
- Homepage of Mahmut Celayir
- Mahmut Celayir, Photorealistic Landscapes, 2002
References and comments
- ↑ Pronunciation Machmut tschelajir, IPA : [maxmut tʃelajir].
- ↑ The birthday is not exactly known. When registering the birth, Celayir's mother spoke of "the melting snow and the bright light of spring", and so the birthday was set as May 1st ( Lipps-Kant 1999 , p. 141). - cure (Turkish Dikme), about 1660 m above sea level: 38 ° 55 ' N , 40 ° 19' O .
- ↑ About 100 kilometers west of Bingol: 39 ° 6 ' N , 39 ° 32' O .
- ↑ Mustafa Aslier has published the only German-language work on Turkish painting ( Aslier 1989 ).
- ↑ Balkan Naci İslimyeli in the Turkish language Wikipedia.
- ↑ Ergin inan in the Turkish language Wikipedia.
- ↑ mustafapilevneli.com homepage (Turkish).
- ↑ Eskisehir is located about 190 km west of Ankara: 39 ° 47 ' N , 30 ° 31' O .
- ↑ Spuler 1868 , pp. 78–90, on “Gods and people. Gilgamesh ”see pp. 84–86.
- ↑ From an interview with Mahmut Celayir in the Kornwestheimer Zeitung on February 8, 2008 ( Sedler 2008 ).
- ↑ From an interview with Mahmut Celayir in the Kornwestheimer Zeitung on February 8, 2008 ( Sedler 2008 ).
- ↑ Virgulism (French virgulisme) is a painting technique in which the colors are placed next to each other in small lines (French virgule = comma).
- ↑ Lipps-Kant 1999 , p. 27.
- ↑ Friedrich also worked on the motif of loneliness in the landscape, e.g. B. in The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog or Morning in the Giant Mountains .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Celayir, Mahmut |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Kurdish-German painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 1, 1951 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bingöl , Turkey |